“Not exactly a back room,” Greimer said, picking at some bit of food caught in his teeth. “Quite a nice window in there, actually. East-facing. Looks right down the Landwehrkanal, if the Baroness would open the damn drapes.”
Kohlwasser’s jaw clenched reflexively. He couldn’t tell if the man’s obtuseness was, so to speak, innate or affected. He suspected the latter when Greimer raised one bristled eyebrow to glance up slyly, as if checking for a reaction. Such insolence. Yet Kohlwasser was resolved to bear it: informants were like children, precious though frequently exasperating, and Greimer might be more than that—a precocious only child. “Who,” he prodded, “was in this room with the splendid view?”
“Well, let me think.” Swirling brandy, sniffing at it. “There was the old Brigadier. Or there probably was. He’s a regular. And I reckon Cissy was there too.”
“You reckon. I’d prefer it if you actually knew.”
Greimer, having evidently teased the glass sufficiently, drained it in a gulp. “It might help me remember,” he said, his throat audibly venting hot fumes, “if I knew what I was remembering for. Why don’t you just tell me what this is all about? That would really help.”
That, Kohlwasser thought, could help this buffoon stitch together some fantastic story, cut to order. “What it’s about,” he said placidly, “depends on how well you remember what actually happened that night. You tell me, and then maybe I can help you. There might be a scoop here that will make your career. So try hard now. Leave nothing out. For instance, who is Cissy?”
“You don’t know Cissy?” Greimer’s tone changed from petulance to near delight. “But everybody knows Cissy. She’s a princess, I think. If not, she really ought to be. Ukrainian, Belorussian, something like that. But speaks better German than I do. And she sings—if you get enough champagne in her! Knows all the lyrics, voice like an angel. Yes, I’m sure she was there; Cissy never misses a party.”
“That’s wonderful. Who else?”
Now that Greimer had started, he seemed happy to go on talking. “Well, you know that fellow Gisevius from the Interior Ministry—he’s the only one I recognized. Used to be high up in the party, didn’t he? Started having doubts, they say, and got shoved aside. Probably bitter about it—that would explain the pickle up his ass.”
“So this Gisevius, you’ve heard him voice his doubts? Or openly criticize the leadership?”
Greimer gave him a canny smile. “Oh no. He’s much too clever for that. Keeps his own counsel, he does. It’s more, you know, the look about him. Anyway, he was there that night. One of the last to leave, in fact. Disappeared into the library and was never seen again. Rather like the old Baron, eh?”
Kohlwasser pulled a chair from beside his desk and turned it to face Greimer across the wide coffee table. He sensed that they were approaching something big and wanted to come at it directly. Seating himself, he reached for the decanter and said, “More brandy?”
“Since you’re offering.”
Kohlwasser tipped in a generous slug and watched the look of pleasure spread across the other slug’s face. “I’ve heard those soirées can run quite late. Were you there the whole time?”
“Me? No. Till about midnight, I guess.”
“How many people were still there when you left?”
“Only…not many. I can’t recall exactly.”
“But this man Gisevius, he was one of them.”
“Right.”
“But who could he have found to talk to, so late?”
“Beats me. The Brigadier was long gone by then. Cissy left with Ricky and Dodo. There would’ve only been the navy fellow.”
“Yes, of course—the navy fellow.” Kohlwasser trusted that his excitement—barely expressed in the involuntary fluttering of an eyelid—would be lost on Greimer. “This would be the person you didn’t recognize.”
“Excuse me?”
“You mentioned before, while speaking of Gisevius: He’s the only one I recognized. So there was someone—”
“Oh, right. Yeah, there was this navy man. Seen him before, once or twice. Never properly introduced.”
“He’s been to the flat on other occasions, then? And he’s spoken with Gisevius each time?”
“Hardly spoken to anyone, from what I’ve seen. The Baroness, she seems to know him. And the Brigadier, I think. Once there was a younger guy. But he was army, not navy. Struck me as odd, now that I remember it. Don’t usually mix well, the Wehrmacht and the Kriegsmarine. But here you have a brand-new Leutnant in full dinner dress and an old sea dog—a two-and-a-half striper, whatever that’s called—and they’re huddled together like a pair of bandits. How do you figure?”
Kohlwasser had barely started to figure anything. He felt like someone who’d been squinting through a chink in the paneling when suddenly the whole wall collapsed, revealing many things all at once. But at that moment he was interrupted by a loud and seemingly urgent knock on the office door.
“Come in, for God’s sake,” he snapped.
The door swung inward and a slim man in a black uniform advanced holding a sheet of yellow paper, then came to attention. “As you requested, Herr Standartenführer—the report of aerial surveillance.”
The report was brief, and Kohlwasser quickly found what he was looking for. He glanced up at the uniformed man—the SS equivalent of a sergeant—and said, “I need to speak to the senior police officer in this district. Whoever that is.”
The sergeant clicked his heels together. “That would be the chief watchmaster of Kaufungen,” he said. “I’ll place the call immediately.”
As the door closed, Kohlwasser turned to Greimer, toward whom he felt a sudden, irrational surge of warmth. “I’m eager to hear more about this young army officer you’ve mentioned. Perhaps you could describe him to me, as best you can remember. But first let’s raise a glass together.”
Greimer straightened on the sofa, his reporter’s instinct aroused. “Are we celebrating something?”
“Not quite celebrating. Not quite yet. Let’s say we’re anticipating.” He poured two fingers of brandy into a glass, then lifted it to clink against Greimer’s. “The net is drawing tight. Tomorrow, we’ll close it.”
—
It had been a slow season at the Gasthaus Schwalbenthal. Otherwise, Frau Müller would have resented being dragged out of bed after eleven at night to check in the couple from Hamburg. And what an unlikely couple they were: she as slender and pale as a blanched asparagus shoot, he as compact and swarthy as a coal miner, though to her surprise his voice—as he spoke for the two of them—was refined and his manners impeccable, a nice change from what often came around here, but we’ll say no more about that.
They registered as Hr. & Fr. Max Grundeis. In the space provided for “Purpose of Visit”—required by new laws that Frau Müller felt were pointless—the little man wrote in a tidy, bookkeeper’s hand, Dying for good country air, the city is unbearable! This gave Frau Müller a laugh, and as a reward she handed them the key to her very best room, away from the public road, with a lovely view up the valley.
“Poor dears, you must’ve had a long drive,” she said, leading them up the creaking staircase. “All the way from Hamburg!”
The young woman groaned comically. “Five hours!” she said, her voice melodic and faintly accented—it couldn’t be Czech, surely? “In this one’s tiny sport car.”
She was only poking fun, Frau Müller was sure, yet her swarthy companion gave her such a look. Well, well—perhaps they were married.
She was turning in at last, having shoved old Müller aside to make a space for herself, when—wonder upon wonders—the bell was rung again by some other late-arriving guest. This one was a fresh-faced lad in sturdy hiking attire, carrying what was unmistakably a rifle bag. He signed in as Samiel Weber. Purpose of Visit: boar hunting.
“You’ll be wanting an early start, I suppose,” Frau Müller said. “We don’t usually serve breakfast before seven. But I suppose—”
“Oh, don’t worry about that. I’ll be off before dawn.”
Mind you go quietly, then, Frau Müller was about to say, but then he began counting out money, evidently meaning to pay in advance, and her heart softened. “I’ll leave out some biscuits. You won’t want your stomach growling and scaring off the boar!”
He gave her a smile, and Frau Müller found it hard to imagine that he was actually a hunter—until he marched upstairs like a soldier the night before a battle, fearless and cocksure. Well, she thought, we’ll see what Herr Boar has to say about that.
FOOLISH AND DANGEROUS
NATURPARK MEISSNER-KAUFUNGER WALD: 28 MAY
Hagen was almost right: they could have made it to Schwalbenthal in time for breakfast. But two things happened.
A little past midnight, on a flat and easy farm road, with open pastures on one side and woodland on the other, they nearly collided with an armed foot patrol coming from the opposite direction. What saved them was a single faint noise—like the buckle on a rifle strap clicking against the barrel—that only Oskar heard. He stopped in his tracks, and when Lena turned beside him he held a finger up to his lips. Clair and Hagen, a few paces back, seemed to get the message, wordlessly closing the gap until the four of them stood together, their breathing slowed to a minimum, listening.
Moon shadows slid over the road as a southerly breeze agitated the tree boughs overhead, and they strained for any sign of what lay out there in that shifty darkness. Oskar could imagine an enemy formation rising black against the pale backdrop of the pasture. To his heightened senses, every twitching branch was a weapon being raised, every sigh of the wind a whispered conversation. Then the clinking sounded once more, closer now, and again a few seconds later.
“Get off the road,” Hagen murmured. “There, in the bushes. Keep low.”
The four of them slipped into a gap between trees where a surge of brambles strained outward, creating a dark and prickly pocket underneath. Oskar found himself pinned against a bracket of stems, his back punctured by countless thorns, unable to move without tangling with dozens more. Hagen crouched beside him, holding the pistol taken from the dead Gestapo agent. The clinking was close now, and Oskar could hear boots clomping as well. How many were there? It was hard to judge, because they were falling in unison. He fought a childish urge to squeeze his eyes shut. But then with no forewarning, their enemies stepped into view and weren’t so frightening at all.
Two men—an older one with a notable bulge around the midsection and a younger one who rose a head taller, his arms swinging carelessly, jostling the rifle at his shoulder—marched out of the darkness and then, after several strides, back in again, as they continued unhurriedly up the road. They remained in view for no longer than a few seconds, but in that time Oskar managed to form a general impression, and he was eager to share it, especially with von Ewigholz.
Waiting for the footsteps to fade—then for a while longer, to be safe—was even harder than awaiting their approach. At last Hagen, by some very small movement, broke the enchantment that held them all paralyzed, and they began painfully extracting themselves from the bramble patch.
“Those uniforms,” Oskar said, “what were they? They weren’t SS or Wehrmacht. They looked…maybe green? I couldn’t tell in this light.”
Hagen was dabbing blood from where a thorn had raked across one temple. “Green would be Ordnungspolizei. Local police. Which is strange.”
“How do you mean?” Lena asked. “As in odd? Or strange as in a Fritz Lang movie where everybody dies?”
“Well…it’s probably not a good sign. It would suggest they’ve broadened the search, that it’s now an all-out effort.” He caught Oskar’s eye. “And perhaps something more as well.”
Oskar frowned. “They’ve guessed where we’re heading, you mean? I don’t see how—”
Lena threw her arms wide. “What does it matter how? The woods are full of cops in the middle of the night. This is hopeless. We’re walking into a trap.”
“I don’t think so.”
That was Clairborne, and it caught them by surprise. The boy’s tone was measured and reasonable—a bright student in the classroom, politely challenging his professor. “If they knew where we were going, they wouldn’t bother searching the trails. They’d just wait for us out there. They’ve called in reinforcements because they’re getting, you know…a little frantic. My father must be raising holy hell. It’s becoming an international incident. Nobody likes that. So while they’re running around yelling at each other, we stroll calmly into this guesthouse under their noses. It’s brilliant.” He shrugged in his insouciant way, flashing them a smile. “I’m not saying it will work, mind you. But it’s brilliant. And we’ve got no other tricks in the bag, do we?”
“We don’t,” said Hagen, who seemed to be making an effort to sound agreeable.
“It will work,” Oskar said.
Lena said nothing, just stepped far enough out into the pasture to get a look at the moon. In that flat, silvery light her face looked stiff and pale, like driftwood, her expression containing no emotion that Oskar could name.
Perhaps he should have thought harder about this.
—
The sky was turning blue with a smear of pink at the horizon when they came to the edge of the forest. There the landscape changed so suddenly and completely that they stopped walking, all four of them, without conferring, and for half a minute stood taking in the view and undergoing a sort of psychic recalibration.
They were facing roughly east. The moon had fallen low behind them and only brushed the tips of a million stalks of unripe barley that rippled outward like a landlocked sea. Some distance off—about three kilometers, according to the map—those waves broke against a low wall of trees, and behind that, majestic, scarcely credible in this flat terrain, rose the Höhe Meissner, its two great humps and broad wooded flanks filling up so much of the vista you could scarcely register it all at once; your eyes needed to pick out bits of it and then stitch them together. The moon struck it face-on, the brightening sky cast it in silhouette, the windbreak of trees concealed its base—the effect was to make the mountain appear disconnected from the land around it, like a titanic floating island that had come to rest in the center of Germany but might take off again at any minute.
“Let’s go,” said Oskar. “We’ve got to make it around to the south slope—that’s where Schwalbenthal is. It used to be a mining village. Now it’s just—”
“Hold on,” said Lena.
Something about her tone, a hint of slyness. The others turned to look at her.
“Shouldn’t we make ourselves look a little more Wandervogelisch? Look, I’ve got some stuff here—odds and ends I picked up in Sababurg, remember? We might as well change now, before it gets light. Here, you’ll love this.”
She shrugged off her sack and loosened its drawstring. They all bent over to inspect the contents as she tugged them out one at a time. First came a floppy cap, dipping to a point at the front, its long plume snapped. Two oversized muslin shirts. A pair of Ottoman breeches. A wide loop of shiny blue cloth that she hung around Oskar’s neck, declaring, “Lyric poet’s sash!” Another cap, Wilhelm Tell–style. Lastly a pair of sandals with laces that ran up the calves, sized for Lena herself.
“You should have the pants,” she told Clair.
He held them at arm’s length, dubious. But, like a good American, he trooped off dutifully toward the nearest hedgerow. The rest of them fell to trying out costume bits in varying combinations, laughing at the results, passing them back and forth. Oskar took a liking to the archer’s cap, Hagen to a peasant shirt whose length he nevertheless seemed puzzled by.
“Try tucking it in,” Lena suggested. “Then let the bottom puff out. No, here, let me show you. First we’ll get this out of the way.” She tugged the handgun from where he’d jammed it under his belt. Then she stretched her arms around him, adjusting the hang of the cloth. “That’s not bad. What do you think?”
“Maybe a little jaunty,” said Oskar. “For a peasant.”
Hagen gave him a sour look; then Clair called from the bushes.
“Come over, I’m not sure I’m doing this right.”
Hagen’s expression changed to something closer to amusement. He’d taken a few steps in Clair’s direction when Lena said, with a new kind of sharpness, “I think that’s far enough.”
She was gripping the handgun in both hands, tipping it back and forth between Hagen and Oskar. “The two of you, sit down. And Clair! Come out here right now, I don’t care if you’re naked. We’re all going to have a talk. Finally.”
Oskar felt as though his mind had just split into halves—one that saw clearly what was happening and understood with fair precision the events that had led up to it, another that refused to accept it. “Not now! For Christ’s sake, don’t do this now. Look!” He waved an arm at the Höhe Meissner, looming closer and more solid than ever in the waxing daylight. “It’s right there—the place we’re trying to get to! We’ve only got to stay together a little longer, please. Give Hagen the gun back. Or just…you keep the gun, that’s fine. But let’s keep moving.”
Lena seemed deaf to it all. Clair stepped out meekly from his hiding place and she wagged the gun at him, apparently a signal to come nearer.
“What’s going on?” said Clair.
“Lena wants to have a talk,” Hagen said without turning to look. “So we’re going to have a talk.”
His voice was so perfectly calm it gave Oskar a chill. It might have been the voice of someone who didn’t intend to die here, or who didn’t give a damn. He pointed to a spot beside the road. “So,” he told Clair, “sit there.” The boy obeyed, and Hagen sat down where he could quickly interpose himself between Clair and the gun. “Now let’s talk,” he said.
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